Uesutotshanpyon!

Although the abuse that the English language takes on this weblog could be seen as a contraindication, I delight in wordplay. So when last week—on April Fools’ Day, appropriately enough—I came across the Bad Translator website, I was hooked.

The site performs a simple task: it takes a phrase of 250 characters or less and passes it through the Google Translator, from English to another language and back to English again, over and over. In the process, the original words and meaning are completely mangled. As the site explains, “Machine translations are useful for getting a general idea about what text written in a foreign language means.” But beyond that “general idea”—watch out!

Song lyrics are good fodder; it seems like their meter and prose are prone to very odd results. So, after a few small tests, I fed it the chorus of the Michigan State University Fight Song. Bad Translator responded with:

“Michigan, my son, ‘Sparta’ We see a strong team that won the game! Less! Less! Less! You can see a weak team and the sport and the game won! ‘Just below! Crew! University of Michigan Winners!'”

It starts out pretty good, but finishes horribly—somehow the word “State” has been lost. To a Spartan, there’s little worse than being conflated with that other university, down the road in Ann Arbor (something that other school has attempted many times in the past 150 years or so).

So I tried again, using the alma mater, “MSU Shadows”:

“University of Michigan, in a cool, dark, black pine Plyushchev faith, our Alma mater, distribution of time dog wallpaper, admiration, respect and love the sound of the University of Michigan.”

Ouch! Again, it has converted my school’s name to (ahem) those other guys. And, insultingly, it managed to expand “MSU” into “Michigan State University” before obliterating “State” and flipping it around (ptui). But still, this is great fun. I mean, who the heck is Plyushchev? And who can beat the absurd surrealism of the “distribution of time dog wallpaper”?

Smarting from the co-optation of two songs dear to my heart, I decided turnabout is fair play, and fed it the fight song of that other school, “The Victors”—and that’s when I fell out of my chair, laughing.

Hot! This cream is a problem!
Long live the fighters,
if in the interests of the Hot!
Michigan best pilot!

Hot! This cream is a problem!
Long live the fighters,
if in the interests of the Hot!
Uesutotshanpyon Michigan!

Holy crap, that’s funny. I imagine that opening line preceded by a spit-take—someone taking the first tentative slurp of a cup of steaming coffee, then suddenly spewing it out in a cloud of mist and shouting an indignant non sequitur, “Hot! This cream is a problem!”

Then, a left turn: the original lyrics’ notion of supporting one’s warriors is retained—but only if that troublesome cup of coffee approves! “If in the interests of the Hot”… if not, well, too bad fighters, you’re at the mercy of that oh-so-fickle Hot.

Then, finally, that awesome word: Uesutotshanpyon. It’s a totally non-existent word; a Google search returns zero results. For some reason the translator, having gotten to the point where “Champions of the West” had become “West Champion,” failed to translate that phrase into Japanese and instead transliterated it phonetically. It came back to English the same way, and remained intact through numerous other translations. I find that hilarious.

Having taken State’s arch-rivals down a notch, I played with some other stuff. Robert W. Service’s “Cremation of Sam McGee” was delightful, starting off indecisive (“Sunday lunch or after work…”) and occasionally turning Mr. McGee into Montréal’s McGill University. “O Canada” wound up being about Brazil. The description of one of my company’s products included something about ferrets.

Bad Translator could be improved a bit. It always runs through the languages in alphabetical order, starting with Afrikaans and ending with Yiddish. I think it should take them in random order—then the results would be different every time. If I were more Javascript-adept I might be able to do this myself.

After some more play, with mixed results, I gave it one of my all-time favourite songs: “Alone Again Or” from the 1968 masterpiece album Forever Changes by Love. It distilled the whole thing down to two lines, and while it’s terse and a bit inscrutable, it retained a sense of poetry:

I remember well, we decided
Yes, I know who I am, what people think, a little love today.

Intrigued by how much it shortened the song, I got to wondering if it could get down to one word, and what it would be. It only needed two more iterations: